BremenInvest, the investment and business promoting agency of the North German city of Bremen, touts Bremen’s ports – a cluster of ports in Bremen and Bremerhaven together make up Bremenports - as the “region’s engine for trade and industry”, creating thousands of jobs in the handling of ships, transport and transshipment of goods, repairs, logistics and other services. The two ports handle a wide range of cargo: containers, bulk goods, automobiles, project cargo, and hazardous goods. The Port of Bremerhaven handles about 80% of the cargo, including containers.
After Antwerp, Bremen is the second most important transshipment hub in Europe for forestry products, steel products and machinery. Bremen’s Neustadt port is home to Europe’s largest terminal for breakbulk and heavy-lift cargo, providing more than a million square meters of warehouse space and outdoor storage, and ships. Neustadt Port, located on the left side of the Weser River, handles, primarily, breakbulk/project cargo, iron and steel products, forest products, etc.
“Non-containerized breakbulk cargo is shipped from the Neustadt port … the cargo includes steel products such as pipes, timber, machinery and machine parts, etc. Components for wind turbines and massive paper rolls for the paper industry are brought ashore here, though a small volume of containers also passes through Neustadt port. Its proximity to the Bremen Cargo Distribution Center means that goods do not have to be transported far,” says Rainer Schaefer, a senior manager with a logistics company near Hamburg.
The Neustadt port remains an important breakbulk hub in Europe, with a large volume of shipments destined for North America. According to Sven Riekers, the sales director at Neustadt Port, about 1.5 million tonnes of breakbulk cargo was handled by Neustadt Port in 2022. Furthermore, the so-called High & Heavy Terminal in Bremerhaven handled about 1.2 million tonnes (of equipment such as construction machines, buses, cranes, etc. as well as other breakbulk goods).
The terminals at Neustadt port have, meanwhile, specialized in the conventional handling of breakbulk cargo arriving on regular liner services and distributed from there to customers throughout Germany. Neustadt port also handles transshipment by floating crane of containers and heavy goods with unit weights of up to 650 tonnes. Increasingly, large components for onshore wind farms are also transshipped through the port, and natural gas liquefaction plants, which arrive in large individual parts in Neustadt port where they are assembled into finished plants, are loaded onto large ships or pontoons for onward transport.
Breakbulk Europe
Breakbulk Europe 2021, an important event for the project cargo and breakbulk industry, scheduled to take place in Bremen in 2021 was cancelled because of the COVID lockdown and other restrictions imposed on visitors. It had been held prior to that in Bremen; the 2022 edition was held in Rotterdam.
Nick Davison, Portfolio Director Breakbulk & CWIEME, Hyve Group PLC, had called the event, held in Bremen during the earlier two years, as “tremendously successful”. He stated that many new companies had benefited from Breakbulk Europe as they identified new business opportunities amid a global gathering.
The move to Rotterdam was part of Breakbulk Europe’s previously announced plan to rotate the event among leading maritime cities. Breakbulk Europe 2023 will be held at the Rotterdam Ahoy, adjacent to the Port of Rotterdam, from June 6 to 8. “We intend to hold the event at this location for two years, and then consider other options for 2024,” Davison had said. Bremen and Bremerhaven are jointly setting up a huge booth at the forthcoming Breakbulk Europe event in Rotterdam.
ESPO Conference in Bremen
Bremen is also gearing to play the host city for an important European maritime event, the European Sea Ports Organization (ESPO) Conference from June 1-2, 2023.
The conference is the biggest annual event of the European port industry and community as ESPO represents port authorities, associations, and administrations of the seaports of 22 Member States of the European Union and Norway at EU political level.
Albania, Iceland, Israel, Montenegro, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom have observer status with the ESPO.
Together with Bremenports – the company that manages the ports in Bremen - ESPO is putting together a program which aims at “combining the broadening-the-lens sessions with hands-on debates”, as Bremenports has been saying.
Meanwhile, Bremen’s mayor Andreas Boyenschulte has asked for more funding from the Federal German Government, saying that the money was needed for the ports. Bremen itself is investing some 500 million Euros in its ports in the next 10 years, With an eye on the upcoming 13th National Maritime Conference on September 14 and 15 in Bremen, Bovenschulte said: “Because the ports, as the pandemic and the energy crisis have shown, are of national importance, we consider a greater participation of the federal government in the port funding to be only fair.” Presently, the federal government pays annually 38 million Euros for all German ports; Bremen receives 10 million Euros.
The Port of Bremen and the Port of Bremerhaven, as a rule, jointly compile cargo statistics. More than 3,700 container ships and 1,200 general cargo ships call here each year; together, these two vessel types represented 70% of all arriving vessels and 66% of all cargo (in gross tonnage). The remaining vessel types included roll-on/roll-off ships and ferries (777), bulk carriers (544), car ships (379), tankers (244), and passenger ships (27).
Major cargo items handled at the Port of Bremen and the Port of Bremerhaven included ores and metal waste, iron, steel, and non-ferrous metals; solid mineral fuels; petroleum products, and minerals and building materials. Other non-containerized cargo included agricultural products, foodstuffs, animal fodder, chemical products, and fertilizers.
Neustadt Port’s Breakbulk Expertise
Neustadt Port representatives have been highlighting the “high-quality breakbulk expertise”. “We have crane and horizontal transport capacities for heavy cargo of more than 200 tonnes, backed by adequate forklifts and reach stackers to handle heavy cargo, making Neustadt Port the ideal site for the breakbulk traffic. Besides loading onto ships sailing on the high seas, our terminal also offers other services for the conventional loading,” a Neustadt Port official tells the American Journal of Transportation. “Neustadt Port offers quality environmental and security services, complying with the regulatory standards.”
There is also plenty of “good land” to support the port’s breakbulk traffic. The quays at the Port of Bremen’s Neustadt Harbor total 2600 meters (8.5 thousand feet) with alongside depth of 11 meters (36.1 feet). Neustadt Harbor offers almost 52 acres (210 thousand square meters) of warehouse space and over 111 acres (450 thousand square meters) of open storage for both temporary and long-term storage.
